Innehållsförteckning för October 2020 från Linux Magazine

Dear Reader, On August 11, Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker announced a “significant restructuring” of the Mozilla Corporation. Mozilla is best known for its flagship product, the Firefox web browser. The restructuring is said to include significant staff reductions – the second layoffs of the year. Baker’s announcement points to the pandemic as a factor in the need for a new start, but commentators wonder if other reasons are behind the change. When Firefox appeared on the scene in 2004, it was exciting and different – and way better than the Internet Explorer browser, which Microsoft was trying to force feed to the world. Since then, the competition has gotten much better. Chrome has stolen some thunder from Firefox, becoming not just the leading Microsoft alternative, but the leading browser in…

The Microsoft process monitor tool has arrived for Linux. Process Monitor (otherwise known as Procmon), is a reimagined version of the tool for Linux. For those that have worked with Procmon, you know it’s a convenient tool to view real-time file system activity. And for developers, Procmon makes it easy to trace syscall activity on a given system. Procmon also supports logging information to file (so you can analyze data at a later time), is highly configurable, supports non-destructive filters, capturing thread stacks and process details, and boot logging. Although the addition of Procmon to Linux might not be terribly exciting to the average Linux desktop user, for developers, Procmon could be a serious game changer. At the moment, Procmon is limited to Ubuntu 18.04 systems running a kernel between…

ADMIN HPC http://www.admin-magazine.com/HPC/ Caching with CacheFS • Jeff Layton For read-heavy workloads, CacheFS is a great caching mechanism for NFS and AFS ADMIN Online http://www.admin-magazine.com/ Building a virtual NVMe drive • Petros Koutoupis An economical and high-performing hybrid NVMe SSD is exported to host servers that use it as a locally attached NVMe device. Solving the security problems of encrypted DNS • Rainer W. Gerling DNS encryption offers WiFi users good protection in public spaces; however, in the enterprise, it prevents the evaluation and filtering of name resolution. Interview with the MariaDB Foundation board Chairman Eric Herman • Mayank Sharma Eric Herman, Chairman of the MariaDB Foundation board, sheds light on the evolving focus of the custodians of one of the most popular and widely used databases.…

Cleaning Up Build Warnings Linus Torvalds recently upgraded his home system to use the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) 10, which is not as important as it might sound. It doesn’t mean everyone should use version 10 or anything like that. However, Linus did notice that after the upgrade, compiling the Linux kernel would spit out vast and copious quantities of warning messages. In fact, he said, “I let them go for a while, in the belief that I could deal with it, but then yesterday I did a pull and didn’t initially even notice that the end result didn’t compile for me, because the build error was hidden by the hundreds of lines of warnings.” He added, “a lot of them were good warnings where gcc warns about things it…

Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a popular protocol for sustaining group conversations online. The user connects to an IRC server, which is usually part of an IRC network, and joins chat rooms, known as channels, in IRC terminology. Channels are carried by every server that is part of the same IRC network, so users all across the network can join the same channels and talk to each other in real time. An IRC bot is a program that connects to a chat service as if it were a user and performs automated tasks. Bots are used for running games, conveying messages across different networks, managing user authentication, and much more. Building a custom bot might seem like a high-end task limited to an enterprise web portal or other commercial service,…

To test new Linux distributions on real hardware, a bootable USB stick with a downloaded image in ISO format will help with bootstrapping the installation. Rebooting the computer with the stick plugged in will often bring up a Live system that can be played around with to your heart’s content, possibly after having to make some changes to the boot order in the BIOS. How does the ISO file get onto the stick? Ultimately, this is done quite simply with a dd command that expects the ISO file as the input (if) and the device entry of the stick (for example/dev/sdd) as the output (of). Tools like Ubuntu’s Startup Disk Creator make things even more convenient with a graphical UI, but there are some concerns. Under no circumstances would you…

Smart WiFi speakers are ubiquitous, attractive, and easy to use, but if you don’t always want to buy the latest model – or simply love your independence – you can build your own loudspeakers to grace your living room. What you learn in the process also helps if you decide to convert high-quality passive loudspeakers. With smart speakers from major manufacturers, the smarter the speaker functions the more problematic the speaker longevity. Additionally, you are dependent on the manufacturer in terms of the feature set and potential updates. Only what is deemed to be useful ends up on the loudspeaker feature list. For example, Sonos hasn’t upgraded the Samba client that it comes with for years [1], saying the device doesn’t have sufficient hardware resources. Surprisingly, they found enough scope…

Hub is an extension to command-line Git that allows you to perform everyday GitHub tasks straight from the terminal. The hub [1] extension forms an important part of the standard toolset for working with GitHub, alongside tools like Prose [2], a text editor, and coding platforms like Atom [3]. There are several huge advantages to using hub. First and foremost, it saves you time by letting you clone or create GitHub private repositories from your command line. Because hub also makes use of the power inherent in the command line, you can also use it to automate repetitive tasks. This article describes the benefits of hub. I’ll give you an example of what hub can do, and then I’ll take you through the basics of using it. Advantages of hub…

Users, developers, and vendors meet at Linux events around the world. We at Linux Magazine are proud to sponsor the Featured Events shown here. For other events near you, check our extensive events calendar online at https://www.linux-magazine.com/events. If you know of another Linux event you would like us to add to our calendar, please send a message with all the details to events@linux-magazine.com. Smart Grid Cybersecurity 2020 Date: October 7, 2020 Location: Virtual Conference Website: https://bit.ly/smart-grid-forums The 4th edition of Smart Grid Cybersecurity draws together utility CISOs and cybersecurity leaders for a thorough investigation of the latest prevention, detection, response strategies, and solutions to guard against an ever-changing threat landscape. openSUSE + LibreOffice Conference Date: October 15-17, 2020 Location: Virtual Event Website: https://events.opensuse.org/ The openSUSE and LibreOffice Projects are celebrating 10 years…

Approximate UK / Europe Oct 03 USA / Canada Oct 30 Australia Nov 30 On Sale Date Reading and understanding the complete Linux kernel would be a very demanding project. Why not build a hobby kernel that implements standard OS features in a few hundred lines of code? Next month we’ll show you how!+ Help us celebrate 20 years of Linux Magazine! Next month's special anniversary issue will include the new Linux Magazine Archive DVD, featuring every article we've ever printed from issues 1 to 239. Secure your copy today by subscribing to the DVD edition of Linux Magazine: https://bit.ly/Linux-Magazine-Anniversary…

Linux fans everywhere now have more choices than ever. With distribution-specific laptops popping up left and right, it was only a matter of time before a desktop environment received the same treatment. So when the KDE Slimbook arrived, it was not only the first laptop to focus on the KDE desktop environment, it was a well-spec’d thing of beauty. And with the rise of popularity of the AMD Ryzen CPU, it makes perfect sense that the makers of the KDE Slimbook (https://kde.slimbook.es/) would migrate their laptops to AMD’s processor. This new laptop easily falls into the Ultrabook category. With a magnesium case that’s less than 20 millimeters thick and either a 14.1" or 15.6" display, the new laptops weigh only 1.1 kg (for the 14.1" option) and 1.5 kg (for…

Google’s open source UI framework for building Android, iOS, macOS, and Windows apps has added another platform … Linux. And with over 500,000 developers working with Flutter (and over 80,000 apps built with the framework), this could mean a boon for apps on Linux. But that’s not all. Canonical (the creators and maintainers of Ubuntu) have dedicated developers to the task. In fact, Ken VanDine, Canonical engineering manager, said this of the move: Canonical is making a significant investment in Flutter by dedicating a team of developers to work alongside Google’s developers to bring the best Flutter experience to the majority of Linux distributions. Canonical will continue to collaborate with Google to further improve Linux support and maintain feature parity with the other supported platforms. From Google’s end, they’ve done…

Debian GNU/Linux is a popular distribution in its own right. On DistroWatch, Debian has been in the top 10 for page views since 2002, a record unmatched by any other distribution except for Red Hat/Fedora. Currently, it is in fifth position. However, Debian’s individual popularity pales in comparison to its influence. On DistroWatch, seven out of the top 10 distros are based on Debian [1], and its influence continues to be present further down the list. In fact, out of 275 active distributions on DistroWatch, 176 (64 percent) are based either on Debian [2] or its most popular derivative, Ubuntu [3]. To help coordinate these children distros, in recent years, Debian has maintained a derivatives page [4] and a separate page for Debian Pure Blend distros [5] (ones that maintain…

In the ‘80s and ‘90s, if you wanted to demonstrate that you knew something about music, you had a massive hi-fi rack with individual components from well-known manufacturers in your living room. In the ensemble of (pre)amplifier, cassette deck, CD player, and turntable, the equalizer was of course a component not to be missed, ideally with illuminated and even motorized sliders and an animated spectrum display. And if it flashed with every beat and you could adjust the trebles and basses to your heart’s content, the would-be hi-fi buff was genuinely satisfied. In the meantime, convenience has triumphed over audiophile inclinations, at least for most music listeners. Squashed into the MP3 format and streamed via Bluetooth on tinny-sounding battery-powered boxes, music playback has finally arrived in the digital age. Even…

A new major release of the most popular open source office suite, LibreOffice, is now available for download. The new release includes numerous improvements across the suite. Although most users won’t notice anything obvious, there are numerous file compatibility improvements, which should go a long way to make interoperability between LibreOffice and other suites even better. The first major compatibility improvement is that LibreOffice includes support for ODF 1.3. Along with this update comes digital signatures for documents and Open-PGP-based encryption of XML documents. MS Office compatibility has been greatly improved with LibreOffice’s handling of DOCX, XLSX, and PPTX files. With this new release, DOCX files now save in native 2013/2016/2019 mode (instead of the outdated 2007 compatibility mode). Along those same lines, XLSX sheet names longer than 31 characters…

Although the Linux PinePhone is still not ready for primetime, the company behind the product have upped the ante with a hardware add-on that makes it possible to turn that Linux-powered mobile platform into a full-blown desktop. The new Convergence Package is a limited edition option that makes use of the PostmarketOS, which is based on the Alpine Linux distribution that includes both mobile and desktop modes. In order to make this work, the PinePhone uses a docking station with two USB-A ports, an HDMI port, and a 10/100Mbps ethernet port. Because PostmarketOS is still in alpha development, it cannot be considered ready for consumer usage, however the core functionality (phone, SMS, LTE, GPS, GPU acceleration) are all operational. The Convergence Package phone specs aren’t going to wow anyone (especially…

The latest iteration of the flagship operating system from SUSE has been unleashed. SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 Service Pack 2 is now available, along with SUSE Manager 4.1. This release brings along with it a number of important features and improvements for the enterprise-ready platform. On the Cloud front, SLE 15 SP2 makes it easier to benefit from hyperscalers using updated cloud images for Alibaba, Azure, AWS, Google, IBM, and Oracle. With SP2 you can also deploy large-scale HPC systems in AWS and support is now provided for the Elastic Fabric Adapter and Graviton2 CPUs. With SLE 15 SP2, users are able to migrate from openSUSE Leap to the enterprise-grade platform (SUSE Linux Enterprise Server). This new option is a “try before you buy” rollout, so users can test SLES…

As any gardener knows, an understanding of local weather plays an important role in gardening success. Frost can kill off delicate seedlings, too much sun can frazzle shade-loving plants, and too much moisture can suffocate roots. I have relied for a few years on a single temperature sensor outside and an indicator inside for an overview of the conditions outdoors. Although it is a useful tool, it has several drawbacks: The wired sensor is at a single, fixed location, only measures current temperature, and is too close to the house. I wanted a system that provides multiple measurement types at multiple locations, requires no wires trailing around the garden, would provide seasonal data to better plan for planting, and has the capacity for alarms to warn of frost and high…

Jon “maddog” Hall is an author, educator, computer scientist, and free software pioneer who has been a passionate advocate for Linux since 1994 when he first met Linus Torvalds and facilitated the port of Linux to a 64-bit system. He serves as president of Linux International®. Early Days of Linux I have written about the Linux/Alpha project and how it happened, but I have never written about why I encouraged the project. I was a technical marketing manager in the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) Unix group. DEC had one of the best implementations of Unix on the world’s fastest 64-bit microcomputer. My main job was to promote that closed source operating system. I had some other experiences that influenced that job. I used Unix. I did not (unlike many managers…

Sparkling gems and new releases from the world of Free and Open Source Software Animation powerhouse OpenToonz OpenToonz is an open source version of Toonz, a widely used and influential 2D animation platform that’s been in existence since the early 1990s. In particular, it was famously used by Studio Ghibli to help create Hayao Miyazaki’s remarkable Japanese anime movies, Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, and Howl’s Moving Castle. Like Blender, Toonz has gone through a metamorphosis from a long-standing macOS and Windows proprietary application to an open source project that finally runs on Linux, a process that started in 2016 and is still finding its own feet. All of which means any of us can now install OpenToonz and start creating our own surreal voyages of animation discovery. As you might…

Order online: https://bit.ly/Linux-Newsstand #238/September 2020 Speed Up Your System Your Linux experience goes much more smoothly if your system is running at peak performance. This month we focus on some timely tuning techniques, including the kernel’s new Pressure Stall Information (PSI) feature. On the DVD: Bodhi Linux 5.1 and openSUSE Leap 15.2 #237/August 2020 Webcams and Linux This month we explore webcams, screencasting, and a cool teleprompter tool. We also look at PHP Building Blocks, Guacamole the clientless remote access tool based on HTML5, and a study of the handy MystiQ Audio/Video conversion tool. On the DVD: Ubuntu Studio 20.04 and Kubuntu 20.04 #236/July 2020 Smarter Directories The rigid structure of nested files and directories used on computer systems around the world was created more than 60 years ago, and…

We are always looking for good articles on Linux and the tools of the Linux environment. Although we will consider any topic, the following themes are of special interest: • System administration • Useful tips and tools • Security, both news and techniques • Product reviews, especially from real-world experience • Community news and projects If you have an idea, send a proposal with an outline, an estimate of the length, a description of your background, and contact information to edit@linux-magazine.com. The technical level of the article should be consistent with what you normally read in Linux Magazine. Remember that Linux Magazine is read in many countries, and your article may be translated into one of our sister publications. Therefore, it is best to avoid using slang and idioms that…